UC Davis

Research on the consequences of targeted incarceration primarily caters to the male Black and white racial binary that has been the cornerstone of American racial politics. While there has been an increase of research generated on the consequences of hypersurveillance, policing, and incarceration for those outside of carceral institutions, much of this research invisiblizes the experiences of system-impacted Chicanxs/ and Mexicanas. These unimprisoned women also live carceral lives, as they experience the slow violence endemic to both incarceration and neoliberal austerity (Story 111). Utilizing a critical carceral studies and Xicanx feminist lens, I explore the scope of their experiences as racialized and colonized people that have bear the brunt of the carceral system as they support currently and formerly incarcerated family members that have been targeted for premature death. This case study uses a combination or oral histories from four Chicana and Mexicana women residing in El Paso, Cuidad Juarez, and Las Cruces as well as my own autoethnographic experience via photo elicitation, to illuminate the ways that the profound material and ideological consequences of carcerality are experienced by those beyond prison walls. Furthermore, the carceral carework that Chicana/x and Mexicana family members of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated boys and men do as carceral brokers through racial and gendered social reproductive labor connects the projects of colonization to current iterations of criminalization that impacts indigenous/Chicanx/and Mexican communities broadly. By centering Chicana/Mexicana voices through oral histories, I formed a third space where the unheard, the unthought and the unspoken can be taken up and used in a decolonial analysis and alternative future-making. This project better understands settler-colonial origins of racial criminalization and ultimately provides a framework to undo these legacies and build towards decriminalization and decolonization of the history and presence of Mexican origin peoples in what is currently known as the United States.